It was a kind of madness, delicious but worrisome, this secret I now held to myself. This precious thing that was mine, the second precious thing that now I owned. But this one I couldn’t put on the dresser. I’d to keep the silk scarf well hidden, aye. It was dangerous, and I’d to protect my sister, and myself. Imagine what folk would say if I paraded about the place in such a blaze of colour, drawing attention to my wanton self and offending the Lord an’ all else, for the blue stripes of the Roanhaven fishwives’ aprons was thought to be the only uniform fit an’ proper for a sober soul. And as for Kitta: still I didn’t know how she had come by such a thing, nor what it was she was wearing beneath her skirt, but I didn’t have to be told that it wouldn’t please Ma, that it would give Da a jamaica and send Granda into a white-hot rage. Kitta wasn’t saying. She would put a finger to her lips and lift her brow, but she wouldn’t be drawn, no.

Isn’t easy to hide a thing when you have no space that’s yours. I had no bed, no cupboard for my clothes, not an inch of the but-and-ben that belonged to me. None of us did. Everything we owned—clothes, caps, boots, drawers, knitting wool, needles, pins, combs—was bundled in together, any which way, and the large closet next to the boys’ box bed held all of this in its bottom part, while Kitta and I slept in the top. So until the boys left again for the fish, and Kitta went back to Rowescroft House, there was nowhere safe I could hide my precious scarf. I’d thought of Ma’s kist, where linens were stored in camphor, and the Bible, but what if Da needed some rags for the Lily Maud, or Ma wanted muslins to dress a wound? Such a risk I couldn’t take.